The Stanford Prison Experiment was conducted at Stanford University in 1971, when Zimbardo was teaching at Stanford University. Zimbardo converted the basement of the psychology department building into a prison, and spent $15 a day to invite a group of students to participate in the experiment. To participate in the experiment, these students must pass a test to prove that they are "normal people with mental health and no disease."
A total of 70 students from all over the United States applied to participate in this two-week experiment. Most of them were students who attended summer courses at Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley. Twenty-four students passed the test, and the students were divided into two groups in a random manner: 9 students served as "prisoners" in prisons and 9 students served as "guards" in groups of three. Zimbardo himself served as the warden.
In order to simulate reality more realistically, the identities of students serving as "prisoners" were replaced by numbers. Everyone wore prisoners’ clothes, fetters and handcuffs. Some students were arrested at home, handcuffed and handcuffed. Kraft paper headgear, and the California police who agreed to cooperate with Zimbardo to carry out the arrest were surprised by the unknown neighbors when the police whizzed away. The students in the “guard” role were dressed as police officers. Wear black sunglasses to increase the sense of authority. When the prisoner enters the prison, the prisoner will be searched naked in accordance with the official procedures of the prison. They have all the powers that the real prison guards have. The students who voluntarily participated in the experiment were told that some of their human rights might be violated during the experiment.
Everything is so real, so that both parties can truly enter the preset roles. There should be no shocking things happening in Zimbardo's mock prison. After all, these so-called guards and prisoners have passed psychological tests to prove that they are "normal, mentally healthy" and good people. Zimbardo also frankly at a seminar held in Toronto in 1996. Before the experiment was carried out, he thought it might be just two boring weeks.
The encounter at the beginning of the experiment was awkward. After all, it took time for both the guard and the prisoner to enter the role. How to pass the boring time? So this group of student prisoners, who had been affected by the anti-Vietnam War student movement in the United States at the time, began to challenge the authority: tore off the number sewn on the clothes, locked themselves in the cell, ignored the guard's order, and made fun of the guard.
The guards suddenly became overwhelmed, and Zimbardo, as the warden and the head of the experiment, told the guards to solve the problem by themselves. So the guards took measures to "suppress" the prisoners: strip off the prisoners' clothes, put the prisoners in confinement for several hours, confiscate pillows and bedding, cancel the meals for the prisoners, force the prisoners to clean the toilet with their hands, perform push-ups or something meaningless. Humiliating prisoners, depriving prisoners of sleep, pulling prisoners out in the middle of the night to count the number of prisoners, and performing various humiliating activities. They also adopted a psychological differentiation strategy: good prisoners who obey management will be provided with privileges, better cells and food.
These "normal, mentally healthy" good people "guards" learn very fast. If you have watched any movie about prisons, this is a common strategy used by guards and prison guards. As the experiment progressed, the disciplinary measures adopted by the guards became so severe that the experimenters had to remind them.
When the experiment lasted 36 hours, a prisoner withdrew from the experiment due to various hysterical symptoms such as crying and cursing due to extreme mental stress. The experiment only lasted for less than two days, and a good "normal, mentally healthy" person has been tortured by a group of "normal, mentally healthy" good people to the verge of collapse.
The prisoner number 8612 was the leader who led the prisoners to resist and challenge the guards' rights on the first day, so he received "special care" in the guards' counterattack. When a series of punishments are imposed behind him, 8612 has realized that this is not a simulated experiment, a virtual prison, but a “real prison set up not by the government but by psychologists”. When 8612 made a face-to-face request to Zimbardo, Zimbardo had already fully entered the role of warden. He was no longer thinking about 8612's mental state, but if 8612 withdrew, it would cause more people to withdraw. Can't proceed anymore.
So Zimbardo, like all the warden in prison movies, promised 8612 that the guards would stop torturing him and give him good treatment. At the same time, he proposed a Faust-style deal: let 8612 return to prison. Be his eyeliner and provide him with information from the prison. If he agrees, Zimbardo will "release" 8612 later. 8612 agreed to Zimbardo and returned to the experiment. When 8612 returned to the prison, the other prisoners began to realize that they could not withdraw, and the person in charge of the experiment would not let them withdraw from the experiment. Hope is disillusioned.
Zimbardo later recalled his judgment at the time. He felt that the 8612 was psychologically too weak and could not bear even the slightest amount of pressure. After all, the experiment only lasted for about a day. How could he ask to withdraw from the experiment so quickly? The experiment has 13 days left!
As an experiment designer and psychologist, Zimbardo was supposed to objectively evaluate the 8612's state, but as a result, he was gradually controlled by the warden's role and affected his judgment. This control lasted until the sixth day, and it was not until the appearance of an outsider that Zimbardo was "saved" from the role of warden.
And on the night (36 hours) when 8612 proposed to withdraw, when Zimbardo graduate student Craig Haney was on the night shift as one of the experiment leaders, he found that 8612 "has a mental breakdown and strongly requested to quit", 8612 could not bear "the guards continued." Constant harassment, simply because he led the prisoner’s confrontation with the guards on the first day.” After agreeing to 8612 to leave the prison for a short break, Craig Haney seemed easy to be an outsider, but he felt extremely difficult at the time. The decision: do you agree to 8612's departure or reject his request? Zimbardo is his mentor and "boss", and cannot harass his rest at midnight. agree? After all, I am only a second-year graduate student. This experiment has spent a lot of effort and funds to prepare. Let the 8612 exit easily means that the experimental design is affected, and the accuracy of the results is undoubtedly questioned. But the current state of this young man is unimaginable when they are designing the experiment. Is it okay to let it go?
After some struggle, Craig Haney decided to agree to 8612 withdrawing from the experiment.
Zimbardo and his colleagues returned to the laboratory the next morning, questioning why Craig Haney agreed to let 8612 withdraw from the experiment. After some discussion, Zimbardo approved Haney's decision. At the same time, they selected a student from the reserve list and asked him to join the experiment that afternoon to fill the vacancy of 8612.
In the basement of the ancient and solemn Psychology Building at Stanford University, the hostility is escalating: the guards are still continuing their games, trying to torture the prisoners; the prisoners continue to endure the torture, responding with obedience like walking dead. This is no longer a cosplay, not a happy summer vacation memory, not a comfortable working experience, but a nightmare. At the beginning of the experiment, “there was no difference between the guard and the prisoner; and after the experiment lasted for a week, there was no similarity between them.” The
devil had been released. It grinned and looked at this group of good people who were once "healthy and mentally normal." It made some "guards" indulge in the pleasure of discipline and punishment; it made some people feel wrong, but forced by the obedience given by roles and promises. Obligation and had to cooperate with other guards, never raised objections or objections, only offered help to prisoners privately; it allowed hatred to be seeded in the hearts of "prisoners", so that after the experiment was over, "guards" and "prisoners" were sitting together When discussing together, the hostile emotion turned the discussion into a vicious confrontation. When they were interviewed by the testers and questionnaires during the experiment, they were all suspicious. In their opinion, the group was friendly and kind at first. The experimenter of is the maker of the iron cage; it makes the psychologists who should be objective lose their judgment.
The test continued until the sixth day. The gradual deterioration of the prison situation activated the psychological adaptation mechanism of all participants: everything was normal, and everything was carried out as planned by the trial design. The initial impression of "this is a lunatic asylum" by the candidate student, code-named 416, who entered the trial for 8612 has also been replaced by the idea of "this is supposed to be a lunatic asylum." After confinement and the experience of humiliating him by inmates under the agitation of the guards, what should be the most normal thing for him was complete isolation. His hunger strike confrontation made the guards and the prisoners stand together in a sense.
The prisoners responded by conditioned reflex to accept the various demands of the guards. Some prisoners imitated 8612 with "crazy performances" in exchange for the opportunity to withdraw from the experiment: on the third, fourth and fifth days of the experiment, one prisoner was agreed to withdraw from the experiment. After the fifth prisoner's request to withdraw was rejected, he developed a rash all over his body and eventually withdrew from the experiment.
During the experiment, the prisoners actually had a lot of opportunities to contact the outside world. In the experiment that lasted only six days, about 100 people came into contact with this group of prisoners with different identities: including a real warden. After contacting all the prisoners, he observed that the simulation experiment was here. The reactions caused by the batch of student prisoners were very similar to those of those who were in prison for the first time; more than 20 psychology students watched the experiment from video monitors and windows; 24 prisoners’ parents and friends were in contact with the prisoners during their visits, and one of them A mother visited a priest after the visit. The priest found a lawyer to provide legal advice on how to get her child out of the "Stanford Prison". The lawyer interviewed all the prisoners on the last day of the trial.
These more than 100 people, including the guards and prisoners, the designer of the experiment, and the psychologist Zimbardo, never thought about another option: abort the experiment. They have become players in the game, trapped in the iron cage woven with reason and science as excuses, unable to get out, only obey and play their respective roles.
Until the sixth day of the experiment, a young lady visited.
When Christina Maslach received Zimbardo's invitation to participate in the research project of the Stanford Prison Experiment, her heart was moved. She has just received a PhD in psychology from Stanford University and her other identity is Zimbardo's girlfriend. But Christina had already obtained the position of assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and was about to leave. She had no time to do so, but she had to refuse the invitation of her lover.
But she still agreed to Zimbardo to help with some interviews. To prepare for the interview, she came to Stanford Prison on Thursday night after about a week of testing. The initial impression was calm. After talking with one of the guards, she felt that this was a good person who was polite, friendly and pleasant.
And the one in charge of the shift that night was the guard nicknamed John Wayne, the most "notorious" guard at Stanford Prison. Despite hearing about John Wayne's deeds, Christina was absolutely stunned after seeing John Wayne: Contrary to rumors, John Wayne is an absolutely good person. But when she started to observe, what she saw was a completely different person: He was wearing black sunglasses, holding a baton, wearing a uniform, howling loudly, scolding the prisoner, and asking the prisoner to report a number of times. Rude attitude.
It was time to take a bath at that time. The bathhouse was outside the prison. The guards locked the prisoners in a row with shackles. Everyone put on a headgear, completely unable to see the environment. Then take them to the bathroom. Zimbardo looked at the situation in the prison through the observation window, and excitedly said to his girlfriend: "Let’s take a look and see what is going to happen now!" "I see it, this scene is great!" But Christina But she turned her head and couldn't bear to look any more, and her heart was filled with a cold and disgusting feeling: such a brutal scene made her feel a sense of powerlessness caused by women in the patriarchal world.
Then, after leaving the test site, Zimbardo wanted to know Christina's evaluation of the entire test. But what he got was unexpected anger, fear, and tears: "What you did to these kids is too bad!" Debating and arguing, Christina was terrified. The one in front of him is no longer her familiar lover, the one with love. Born as a child, a gentle and sensitive psychologist known as Stanford. The positions between them have never been such a huge opposition and disagreement, and the quarrel between them has never been so intense, so long, and left such a huge trauma, she can't even imagine that she will get along with such a person in the future.
As a result of this quarrel, Zimbardo finally succumbed. He stepped out of his role as warden, and from his pursuit of accuracy and objectiveness of experimental reason. He apologized to his lover and decided to terminate it the next morning. test. Gather all the people involved in the experiment to reflect on the whole process: how did a simulated experiment gradually evolve into a real prison, such a serious madhouse?
At this moment, Zimbardo felt not disappointed, but relieved, relieved, and the relationship between him and Christina, his girlfriend at the time, who later became his wife.
But what really scares Christina is her role as a system challenger and disobedience: if she has been involved in the experiment, can she have such a huge emotional touch? If she participates in the design and is psychologically adaptable by seeing things happen every day, will the lunatic asylum in front of her become normal like all the more than 100 people involved in the experimental project? She really can’t do it. Give an affirmative answer.
Just like Morrow’s old saying: “we are prisoner of our own experience.”
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